Unwritten Poetry

Unwritten Poetry

Author: Scott A. Trudell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0192571699

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Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period's theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. This book reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which—and by whom—its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer's larynx to actor's body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.


Making Milton

Making Milton

Author: Emma Depledge

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0198821891

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A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.


A New Companion to Milton

A New Companion to Milton

Author: Thomas N. Corns

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-03-21

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 1118827821

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A New Companion to Milton builds on the critically-acclaimed original, bringing alive the diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies while reflecting the very latest advances in research in the field. Comprises 36 powerful readings of Milton's texts and the contexts in which they were created, each written by a leading scholar Retains 28 of the award-winning essays from the first edition, revised and updated to reflect the most recent research Contains a new section exploring Milton's global impact, in China, India, Japan, Korea, in Spanish speaking American and the Arab-speaking world Includes eight completely new full-length essays, each of which engages closely with Milton's poetic oeuvre, and a new chronology which sets Milton's life and work in the context of his age Explores literary production and cultural ideologies, issues of politics, gender and religion, individual Milton texts, and responses to Milton over time


Scholarly Milton

Scholarly Milton

Author: Thomas Festa

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2019-03-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1942954824

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'Scholarly Milton [...] is admirably clear and informative. It lays out the basics of Milton’s education and intellectual life and the evolution of his thinking in relation to the political concerns of his time in ways that should orient a person new to this material at the same time as it provides a focused refreshment for someone more expert. The articles themselves offer engaging and thoughtful explorations of Milton’s work by grounding their analysis in specific seventeenth-century intellectual concerns. [...] It should be clear that the essays in this volume speak to one another in fruitful ways; they foreground Milton the educator as much as Milton the scholar. Both educators and scholars will find it equally useful.' Margaret Thickstun, MLA


Shakespeare's adolescents

Shakespeare's adolescents

Author: Victoria Sparey

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-04-09

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1526168189

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Shakespeare’s adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of ‘signs’ associated with an individual’s physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different ‘signs’ of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories. By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare’s adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent’s state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare’s celebrated characters and actors.


Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Author: Dustin D. Stewart

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0192599631

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This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse—exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth—is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse—driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young—is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.


A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies

A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies

Author: John Lee

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-14

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1118458761

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Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period. This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in Shakespeare studies, and the relative lack of such texts concerning English Literary Renaissance studies as a whole, which includes major figures such as Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. The tripartite structure offers a map of the critical landscape so that students can appreciate the breadth of the work being done, along with an exploration of the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time. Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is must-reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern and Renaissance English literature, as well as their instructors and advisors. Divided into three main sections, “Conditions of Subjectivity,” “Spaces, Places, and Forms,” and “Practices and Theories,” A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies: Provides an overview of theoretical work and the theoretical-informed competencies which are central to the teaching of English Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare Provides a map of the critical landscape of the field to provide students with an opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the work done Features newly-commissioned essays in representative subject areas to offer a clear picture of the contemporary theoretically-engaged work in the field Explores the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time Offers examples of the ways in which the practice of a theoretically-engaged criticism may enrich the personal and professional lives of critics, and the culture in which such critical practice takes place


Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

Author: James M. Bromley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-05-27

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0192638068

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This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.